Philosophical History of Identity

The Ancient Greeks

Any journey across a field this vast must necessarily be but one possible version that takes shape by way of a particular organizing principle. This section begins by going backback in the manner fitting in the West to philosophies of anythingto Socrates and Plato. If identity can be understood initially as being related to the ancient Greek notion of philosophy, then all such philosophy is concerned with a way of life. To give this idea its context, the dictum, as famous as it is misunderstood, is that the task of identity is to know thyself. For the Greeks, this means not that one is already a fully formed self and identity, hence the Greek desire to understand education; rather, one's identity must never take leave of the acknowledgement that one is not an immortal.

Thus, one's place is in mortality, and to know this is to know something inescapable about one's identity. To be mortalhaving to have to dieis the overriding issue in the forming of one's identity. This pressing truth is always linked with his never-ending belief in the transformative power of [Page 556]talk, and for Socrates, education remains the key to understanding one's identity. Using this idea of knowing yourself in its Greek sense, from the start, identity is a way of making one's way in the face of one's mortality, and this concern is what can be a way of seeing the motivation of all subsequent searches in the philosophies of identity. The idea of finitude has exerted a nearly unimaginable power in Western thinking about who and how we are. Furthermore, thinking about identity demands questions concerning who and how we ought to be.

A growing concern for the distinction between the psyche (soul) and the soma (body), and from this to the belief in a this-worldly life and an otherworldly life, began to take shape in Greek thinking (this other-worldly thinking in Plato, of course, has differing versions, see e.g., Republic, Gorgias, Phaedrus, and see also the claim in Phaedo, “Philosophy is the preparation for death”). Platonism (one is careful not to say Plato here) won the day rather than Socrates or other of his heirs (e.g., Diogenes or Epicurus), which makes it possible in the face of knowing one's mortality for a certain Christianization of identity to take hold of Western thinking.

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